file storage

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Golden

Golden

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what's the safest way to go about storing 16bit/44.1 master mixes? make back-ups by burning the wav files on to disc? 2nd hard drive specifically for this purpose? both? any suggestions? is there a procedure?
 
Whatever the format you choose, make sure you have at least two copies of each and every file at all times. You might even want to use different types of media, for example CD and a hard drive.
 
I back stuff up on an external drive and cd. The cd I put in a safe place and never plan on having to use it. So basically I have the original on my studio pc, a copy on the external drive and a copy on cd. Whats the chances of all three going bad at the same time :)
 
From my computer professor many many years ago: "You don't have a reliable backup until you have >3 COPIES< of your data, preferably on 3 different types of media stored in fireproof safes in at least 2 different cities."

Burn CDs or DVDs on good disks (not the cheapies from local office store, good disks are not that expensive i.e. Taiyo-Yuden) and mail them to relatives in other parts of the country... ask them to put them away somewhere safe.

Then copy everything to a USB/Firewire drive and buy a safety deposit box or a waterproof fireproof box -- I just got one from OfficeDepot for $50.

Remember that NOWHERE on the planet is immune from tornadoes, earthquakes and especially FIRE.

Good article to read and bookmark "How to choose CD/DVD archive media"
http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/10/30/how-to-choose-cddvd-archival-media/


---- Why am I paranoid??? I live in South Florida where we've been hit by >5 HURRICANES< in the last 2 years, with two Category2's (130mph winds) coming right over my house! Plus 15 years of IT experience in the area caring for terrabytes of data. Any company down here not doing out-of-area backups is just ASKING to be wiped....
 
I saw a lacie hardrive in a pro audio shop... would that be a good way to go? thanks for the info guys!
 
I got a 250 Gig external drive on Ebay for $100 shipped. It has USB and Firewire. I actually use that as my main drive (because I record in 2 different locations) and backup to my internal drive. Works like a charm. I burn to DVD once the session is totally complete (which never seems to happen).
 
Golden said:
I saw a lacie hardrive in a pro audio shop... would that be a good way to go? thanks for the info guys!
Click to expand...
LaCie is a company that has been around for a very long time, although originally they were strictly Mac SCSI drive vendors. They certainly know their stuff when it comes to storage...
 
One of the easiest, cheapest and most efficient eays to do backup offline/offsite storage these days IMHO is through an Internet is through an Internet file storge site like iBackup or Xdrive. Just secure FTP your files to them and don't worry about it. Added bonus is that they do their own backups as well, so you have even extra layers of backup at a second site.

G.
 
Hahaha... Glen, I know I've teased you about being old in the past... I guess it's my turn to show my age... as if the gray hair on my head doesn't. :rolleyes:

Call me old fashioned, but I don't feel at ease at handing off my files to some invisible place on the internet. The sad thing is, I actually work as an IT sys admin... uh... or maybe that's the reason? :confused:
 
noisewreck said:
Call me old fashioned, but I don't feel at ease at handing off my files to some invisible place on the internet. The sad thing is, I actually work as an IT sys admin... uh... or maybe that's the reason? :confused:
Click to expand...
I can kinda understand where you're coming from, Noise...as an old SysAdmin myself. But I also remember as SysAdmin and even as lowly Sysop (ah, the good ol' days of mainframes and minis :D) handing my backup tapes off to a 3rd party data storage company for the off-site leg of the storage rotation. Depending on the company and their location, we either had to drive the tapes there ourselves or they had someone come by to pick them up from us.

I really don't see that as a whole lot different here; the main difference is that the transfer is made via secure FTP and storage (128-bit encryption) instead of an Anvil case. In some ways that can be viewed as more secure in that there is no middlemen in the transfer process, that the transfer is more secure and more anonymous, and the storage is on a fairly anonymous system architecture. I also don't see it as a whole lot different than trusting a 3rd party hosting company to run my company server, which is done all the time with far more sensitive data than a few independant songs ;).

{EDIT}
Here's the blurb from the Xdrive main page:
It's hard to imagine a safer place for a file than Xdrive. Let's say you want to store files from your latest new business pitch — definitely not for anyone else's eyes. First, Xdrive uses 128-bit encryption to protect files during transfer. Then stores it in architecture that's isolated, multi-tiered and gated. Finally, your data is housed in your own password-protected vault at our World Class, disaster-proof data centers, protected by biometric locks and full-time security professionals.​
{/EDIT}

It comes down to whether it's a company that can be trusted. I know Xdrive has been around for a long time, I first tried them out sometime in the mid 90s and the'yre still kicking (and bought by AOL). I think they're track record is pretty good as far as trustworthiness; my undertsanding is that have a lot of corprate and government clients.

Certainly better than my old Bernoulli drives used to be ;) :D.

And another really nice advantage to them is that your files are offline/offsite yet still accessable at the same time. Great if you want to access your music project from another location like someone else's studio with a braodband connection without having to worry about drive format compatability issues or taking the time to burn a dodgy data DVD-R or a box full of CD-Rs every time you move or update your files. Just save a copy of the new stuff to your secure Xdrive and it'll be there waiting for you when you get back home or to the next location.

G.
 
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SouthSIDE Glen said:
And another really nice advantage to them is that your files are offline/offsite yet still accessable at the same time. Great if you want to access your music project from another location like someone else's studio with a braodband connection without having to worry about drive format compatability issues or taking the time to burn a dodgy data DVD-R or a box full of CD-Rs every time you move or update your files. Just save a copy of the new stuff to your secure Xdrive and it'll be there waiting for you when you get back home or to the next location.

G.
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Alright... you twisted my arm alright :D That definitely is a nice advantage :D
 
SouthSIDE Glen said:
I can kinda understand where you're coming from, Noise...as an old SysAdmin myself. But I also remember as SysAdmin and even as lowly Sysop (ah, the good ol' days of mainframes and minis :D) handing my backup tapes off to a 3rd party data storage company for the off-site leg of the storage rotation. Depending on the company and their location, we either had to drive the tapes there ourselves or they had someone come by to pick them up from us.

I really don't see that as a whole lot different here; the main difference is that the transfer is made via secure FTP and storage (128-bit encryption) instead of an Anvil case. In some ways that can be viewed as more secure in that there is no middlemen in the transfer process, that the transfer is more secure and more anonymous, and the storage is on a fairly anonymous system architecture. I also don't see it as a whole lot different than trusting a 3rd party hosting company to run my company server, which is done all the time with far more sensitive data than a few independant songs ;).

{EDIT}
Here's the blurb from the Xdrive main page:
It's hard to imagine a safer place for a file than Xdrive. Let's say you want to store files from your latest new business pitch — definitely not for anyone else's eyes. First, Xdrive uses 128-bit encryption to protect files during transfer. Then stores it in architecture that's isolated, multi-tiered and gated. Finally, your data is housed in your own password-protected vault at our World Class, disaster-proof data centers, protected by biometric locks and full-time security professionals.​
{/EDIT}

It comes down to whether it's a company that can be trusted. I know Xdrive has been around for a long time, I first tried them out sometime in the mid 90s and the'yre still kicking (and bought by AOL). I think they're track record is pretty good as far as trustworthiness; my undertsanding is that have a lot of corprate and government clients.

Certainly better than my old Bernoulli drives used to be ;) :D.

And another really nice advantage to them is that your files are offline/offsite yet still accessable at the same time. Great if you want to access your music project from another location like someone else's studio with a braodband connection without having to worry about drive format compatability issues or taking the time to burn a dodgy data DVD-R or a box full of CD-Rs every time you move or update your files. Just save a copy of the new stuff to your secure Xdrive and it'll be there waiting for you when you get back home or to the next location.

G.
Click to expand...

All that aside, you still have the issue of FTP and TCP/IP in general basically being an unreliable method of transport for large files. Bits lost here and there can end up ruining a perfectly good file. Unless there's an extremely dependable CRC and correction method implemented in the protocol, I don't think that FTP or TCP transfers over more than 5 hops are anywhere near reliable enough for music data, and 90% of the time not more reliable than a physical format (DVD/CD-Rs are pretty hard to destroy if you get a good brand and correctly store them). I'd agree with TimOBrien on this one. If the data is that important, there's no reason to take any risks with it. Assume all possible things will go wrong and create a plan beforehand to recover, don't trust just one service, medium, or person (including yourself... one rm -rf ./* on a backup server in the wrong directory can spell disaster).
 
timthetortoise said:
All that aside, you still have the issue of FTP and TCP/IP in general basically being an unreliable method of transport for large files.
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I'm sorry to be blunt, but this is an insane position.

I've been using it for server website and database management and transfer (including indexed databases in the scores of megabytes in size) for 13 years, - many of those working with high-security government data - and music and video file transfer for around 8 years, and in the untold gigabytes of data I have moved around I have never lost a single bit.

And it's not the size of the file so much as the amount of data in total; the more data you move, the higher the chance for an error. Yet somehow Citibank, Amazon.com, Google, meTube, etc. manage to move terrabytes of data a day, hopping all over the world, without problems. Hell, just the music files on meSpace alone probably constitute a terrabyte of data transfer in megabyte-scale file size every day, and they get along just fine.

And nowhere was it suggested to use a place like Xdrive as a single storage point. If you notice, it was used in context of the off-site storage facility, which is only one point of any standard three-point data storage plan. In which capacity there are plenty of business and government agencies, big and small, that trust their corporate data to using Xdrive or iBackup for their off-site storage.

G.
 
timthetortoise said:
All that aside, you still have the issue of FTP and TCP/IP in general basically being an unreliable method of transport for large files. Bits lost here and there can end up ruining a perfectly good file. Unless there's an extremely dependable CRC and correction method implemented in the protocol, I don't think that FTP or TCP transfers over more than 5 hops are anywhere near reliable enough for music data, and 90% of the time not more reliable than a physical format (DVD/CD-Rs are pretty hard to destroy if you get a good brand and correctly store them). I'd agree with TimOBrien on this one. If the data is that important, there's no reason to take any risks with it. Assume all possible things will go wrong and create a plan beforehand to recover, don't trust just one service, medium, or person (including yourself... one rm -rf ./* on a backup server in the wrong directory can spell disaster).
Click to expand...

TCP/IP is the standard for a reason. It "guarantees" no data loss or corruption. It has it's own checksums to see if data was sent correctly. Unlike UDP where there are no guarantees and data loss/corruption is pretty normal. This is why TCP is slower. This is done at the protocol layer not the application layer.

Some FTP servers have modified the FTP protocol (not sure if XDrive is one) to support encryption and also MD5/CRC checksums themselves. Regardless, it's a pretty simple protocol and file corruption is MUCH less likely than any kind of CD/DVD media.

I would personally use a reliable external hard drive and then something like XDrive so it can be accessed remotely if you need to from another studio or whatever.
 
danny.guitar said:
TCP/IP is the standard for a reason. It "guarantees" no data loss or corruption. It has it's own checksums to see if data was sent correctly. Unlike UDP where there are no guarantees and data loss/corruption is pretty normal. This is why TCP is slower. This is done at the protocol layer not the application layer.

Some FTP servers have modified the FTP protocol (not sure if XDrive is one) to support encryption and also MD5/CRC checksums themselves. Regardless, it's a pretty simple protocol and file corruption is MUCH less likely than any kind of CD/DVD media.

I would personally use a reliable external hard drive and then something like XDrive so it can be accessed remotely if you need to from another studio or whatever.
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Thank you, Danny, this is all correct.

Consider this: Most every website one visits that is hosted by a third-party hosting company - and that is by far the vast majority of websites - has gotten their information uploaded to them from their client via FTP. And every one of those websites is accessed by you and me with our browsers via TCP/IP. In other words, for all intents and purposes, virtually the entire Internet is run on those two protocols. If they were so damn unreliable, we'd be seeing corrupted web pages, bad user data, and broken or distorted images all over the place.

As much as I'd like to blame all my typos on bad communication protocols, I can't. That's just me typing too fast for my own good :( :p

G.
 
alright fellas, I'm going to go with the lacie 160gig triple interface drive. I don't have a firewire port on my computer, so I guess it's usb for me. that should be fine, correct? the only advantage with firewire is speed, right? No quality issues going on here?

Much appreciated!
 
Golden said:
alright fellas, I'm going to go with the lacie 160gig triple interface drive. I don't have a firewire port on my computer, so I guess it's usb for me. that should be fine, correct? the only advantage with firewire is speed, right? No quality issues going on here?

Much appreciated!
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Correct. And mine works fine with FW or USB.

Edit - I guess it should be mentioned that speed could = quality. If you are streaming wav files, and your USB can't keep up, you will probably have dropouts, or annoying pops. But, like I said, it hasn't been a prob for me.
 
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